Samish VIII

32" X "70

Relief and Intaglio Printed Woodcut on Arches Paper

This piece was made in 2018

Printmaker Charles Cohan derives his abstract typologies from views of landscapes, airports, flight trajectories, and racetrack circuits. He is fascinated by “the simultaneous mapping of distinct yet coordinate information systems, the optical confusion that occurs within the overlaying of images of a shared type, and the loss of the original amidst the similar,” as he has said. His collagraph prints picture tangled webs of overlapping lines, piles of shapes, or unwinding knots. Yet they are based in very specific human activities, so that the images are in essence both figurative and abstract. Divorced from any reference to place, these disoriented maps of human activity point to the contradiction between the two-dimensional plan and the seemingly uncoordinated movement that it inscribes.